The Season of Capitalism

How we make up for lost time and wages during the holidays

Rachel Wayne
7 min readNov 4, 2023

Swept clear of candy and costumes, retail shelving beckons for sparkly ornaments and plastic reindeer. The lights of the Spirit Halloween signs, once a welcome illumination to previously vacant storefronts, have now faded as the strip mall returns to its usual dusty state.

It may seem that spooky season is over, but it’s merely a phase in a long winter that stretches from Independence Day to New Year’s Day. The holidays linger, almost without form, and yet we can reliably predict when each wave of seasonal products will crash onto those shelves. Each obliterates the last, like the surf chopping away at a lovingly built sandcastle. But what it’s actually destroying is our will to resist.

Spiritual restoration and community connection be damned: this is the season of capitalism.

It’s the Most … Expensive Time of the Year

It’s no wonder that we’re all feeling the holiday fatigue before we even get to Thanksgiving. The holiday season is famously stressful, and it seems to never end. Furthermore, it disrespects the traditional dates. Christmas starts in July and continues to intensify. Much like the season’s anthem, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” it starts soft…

--

--

Rachel Wayne

Artist/anthropologist/activist writing about art, media, culture, health, science, enterprise, and where they all meet. Join my list: http://eepurl.com/gD53QP